Good Dog Creative

The widespread hatred for the Comic Sans font throughout the design community is well known. While that particular font is avoided as if it carries the black plague, sometimes a playful comic style font is still useful. Here I’ve gathered 5 well designed and playful alternatives to Comic Sans that are free for personal and non-commercial use with simple, cheap and even noble licensing options.

Tooney Loons was created by Jason Arthur and is free for personal, non-commercial use. Be sure to check out Jason’s other quality fonts.

Post Human was created by Andrew Pinkard and is free for personal, non-commercial use. Have a look at Andrew’s site Teabeerstudios.com for more free and pay fonts along with other goodies like Fighting Spirit Comics and the various logo and graphic services that he offers.

Action Man and Earths Mightiest come from Iconian Fonts and Dan Zadorozny. These fonts are free for personal, non-commercial use but if you’d like to use them or any of Dan’s wonderful fonts for commercial he has a simple and wonderfully selfless suggestion:

If you’d like to use a font of mine for commercial purposes, I ask that you make a donation to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, a great organization that supports a wonderful cause. My suggested donation is $50 per font and is based on what I’ve seen other commercial fonts priced at. However, this is just a suggested guideline and you may donate any amount that you feel is fair and reasonable for the font. If that’s less than $50 I understand, and on the other hand you may be willing to donate more than $50 for such a worthwhile cause.

Ray Johnson was created by K-Type Type Foundry. Ray Johnson is a pay font but K-type is kind enough to offer a freebie version for personal and non-commercial use.

The Ray Johnson font was inspired by the Father of Mail Art (or the Grandfather, depending on who you read). It is based on the block lettering style used by Ray to add the names of his correspondents to their bunny head portraits (the film ‘How to Draw a Bunny’ is a superb introduction). The font includes blank bunny heads and other Ray Johnson graphics as scalable vector images, and separate bitmap images are also provided as jpegs and gifs.